The Purpose of a Sump Pump Installation

For some people when you hear of sump pump installation you may not know what a sump pump is and why one would even need to install it. If this is you, then this is a nice blog post for you to read.

First off, a sump pump is a pump design to pump water from one location to another. Of course, there are many reasons why this would need to be done, but in the context of what we are talking about here it would be to keep a basement in a home from flooding. You see, in some places homes with basements may have an inherent issue of lots of water finding its way down the side of the home and underneath it. Then, because it is water and can find its way through even the smallest of cracks, it will find its way through the basement floor and begin to flood the basement. There are numerous reasons why water gets underneath a home, but for now we are not going to discuss why this happens, just know that it does happen. The issue is that there needs to be a solution to this issue to keep a home’s basement, in this situation, from being in a constant state of flooding.

The key to all of this is to get to the water below the level of the basement floor. To do this a decent sized hole is cut into the basement floor. If you think about a round black pipe just a little larger round that the human body, so that a normal sized adult could crawl through it, that is about how large the hole in the basement floor is. This hole is then dug rather deep to get below the concrete floor which is typically 4” thick, and the vapor barrier that was laid under the concrete, and all of the gravel base that was laid in preparation for the pouring of that concrete. This is all dug out because the water is filling every bit of space between the gravel base. Once the hole is deeper than this, the water will rush in to fill this void. A large black pipe or some other barrier, with some various holes in it, is then placed in the hole creating what is called a sump. A water pump is then situated into the hole so that the pump part is under the level of the water. Pipe is then affixed to the pump and run to the outside of a home to a place where it will not simply re-enter the home. This is how a sump pump installation is done.